Patternity co-founders Anna and Grace on monochrome and dressing as a duo

As a pair, Anna Murray and Grace Winteringham and their streamlined, mostly monochrome wardrobes create something of a pattern themselves. They have championed all things pattern since co-founding Patternity, the image archive and creative studio, and for the last seven years have worked across multiple disciplines from design to science, collaborating with brands like Clarks, hosting events during London Design Week and recently publishing their first book.

Many are surprised Anna and Grace don’t wear more pattern, but they are staunch advocates of simple dressing, prizing comfort above all else. Meeting with them in their offices in Shoreditch, we talk about the role of clothes in finding your identity as a duo, how they have influenced each other’s styles, and ultimately, how to balance being your brand with being yourself.

Jack Johnstone: Patternity

What do you do at Patternity?

Anna: Well, we’re the co-founders of Patternity and we specialise in all things pattern. What we do revolves around three core parts: an archive, research and events. We started off with an image archive essentially and then the deeper that went and as awareness of what we did grew, that led to a studio and people started wanting to work with us on specific projects implementing our research.

That’s enabled us to work across lots of different worlds: fashion, art and design but also science and quite out-there projects. Now we work on events as well. Those could be experiential or community and social events, workshops, talks. I think fundamentally what we’re trying to do is use pattern in a positive way.

Jack Johnstone: Grace Winteringham and Anna Murray, Patternity

What have you been working on recently?

Anna: We recently did a big talk at the V&A with about 300 people and that was very much about the Patternity journey because we brought out our first book at the end of last year. That went into our inspirations but also how we implement our ideas as a duo and as a team.

Grace: We had our book launch last year so we’ve kind of been on a bit of a wind-down from that. Now we’re on a wind-up working towards the next big thing. It feels like come spring lots of things will come to fruition, so it’s a really exciting time. It’s a bit of a cliché but it feels like finishing the book marked the end of one chapter and now we’re starting the next.

Anna: The book basically consolidates five years of the visual research and thinking behind what we do. It’s got everything from the Fibonacci sequence straight through to the head of Google talking about patterns in engineering, so it really spans everything.

Jack Johnstone: Patternity

Is there much of a tie between what you wear and what you do?

Grace: In terms of how clothes relate to our work, all our work has been quite monochrome. It’s just nice to simplify. I know colour is amazing for mood and it can bring a lot of positivity to people but I think when you’re working with pattern all the time, to be wearing it as well it seems a bit much.

When we’ve done collaborations like our Clarks Originals, that was great because we could actually wear that stuff, but we haven’t gone down the Hawaiian shirt road yet. It would be such a nice thing if we could make our own clothes.

Anna: Well who knows? Our research is getting much more technicolour and we’re starting to look at things like music or psychedelia, so you kind of get into some quite interesting worlds.

“It’s just nice to simplify. When you’re working with pattern all the time, to be wearing it as well it seems a bit much.”

Grace Winteringham

Jack Johnstone: Grace Winteringham, Patternity

Jack Johnstone: Patternity

I can imagine there’s quite a lot of variety in your working days. Is your style consistent despite your schedule?

Grace: We’re pretty consistent.

Anna: I guess we’re consistent in colours. Sometimes we might do yoga before work and we’ll wear sportswear underneath. We also like making the studio feel quite homely because it’s somewhere you spend often more time than you do at home, so it’s a place to be comfortable as well. There’s a bit of a rhythm to it and obviously if we have meetings we don’t wear our slippers.

In the same way as with our design work though, I think we like not having to choose from lots of different colours or patterns. Often people expect us to wear lots of patterns but really we’re quite simple in what we wear: black, white, navy, maybe some kind of green. I suppose there’s so much choice and you could wear anything, but we kind of have a bit of a uniform.

Grace: You can obviously mix combinations of similar colours without having to think too much. I mean some people really go to town getting up in the morning and dressing themselves for the day, which is lovely, but I think that’s less appealing to me. I like to just get up and get on.

Jack Johnstone: Patternity

Do you think it’s beneficial when work and personal style line up?

Grace: I think we’re spoilt here [in London] because there are so many interesting looking people but we’ve met some really amazing people who at first glance might not be the best dressers.

Anna: I do think an aesthetic is a way to express yourself. I think it can be a good extension but it shouldn’t identify you too much.

I didn’t really wear our Clarks when they first came out but I’ve started to wear them out and about and we’ve had a couple of collaborations that have come from wearing them because it’s a conversation starter. I think that can be really nice.

Grace: I guess what it can do is help people to see the potential because it’s not always so simple for someone to grasp that depending on what you do. When we are just in black and white it might be harder to imagine how pattern could work in different ways. It kind of works both ways. Normally what we wear is just one question in an interview or it’s not even really spoken about.

Jack Johnstone: Patternity

Jack Johnstone: Anna Murray, Patternity

Have you influenced each other’s style much?

Anna: I think it’s a constantly evolving thing. At the beginning we were really different; Grace had a black bob and I had long blonde hair and then gradually it’s all morphed and merged. There are certain things, like I tend to wear a hat because after a while our hair was so similar people were like “Which one’s Anna? Which one’s Grace?” It just makes it easier. Finding your identity in a duo and how dress comes into that can be quite important, so it’s a series of experiments and it’s always changing.

Grace: I think we do have a different approach as well. It’s certainly more of a subconscious thing for me. I probably have been massively influenced by Anna but it hasn’t been conscious.

Anna: As we’re growing as a duo and as individuals and as a business, you kind of start to learn that you do think about things in quite different ways, but you’re usually working toward similar goals. So it can be an interesting segue into stories and values.

Grace: In a way you do kind of have to be your brand.

“Finding your identity in a duo and how dress comes into that can be quite important, so it’s a series of experiments and it’s always changing.”

Anna Murray

So are you the same in your downtime?

Anna: We got asked at the end of this talk recently if there was much time for chaos in our work because everything seems quite controlled, which maybe is this new phase we’re going into and we can explore that through events, so it might be a gong bath or an art therapy workshop.

There is another side to us as well, there’s so many photos of Grace and I at festivals or music nights and we love fancy dress. We’re also doing some music nights at the Ace Hotel this year.

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h3. What are you wearing today?

Today I’m wearing a navy cotton twill shirt, which is a traditional Spanish fisherman’s shirt. You can even buy them in supermarkets in parts of Spain and they’re kind of like the general worker’s shirt, but they tend to be referred to as fisherman’s shirts. People wear them for festivals and things as part of a sort of folk uniform almost. My missus is Spanish so we go there regularly but I make a point of not wearing them when I’m there because it’s sort of a specific thing in Spain. It’s a bit like going out and wearing an England shirt here or something – it kind of marks you out as a certain part of society.

I’ve always worn a lot of that workwear sort of stuff, partly because it feels right because I make things and I spend some of my time in the workshop – more now days than I used to. So it sort of works functionally and it wears nicely and it can cope with a bit of abuse and patina as it would be called in the furniture trade. A paint splash or a small tear doesn’t destroy it in the same way they would with some shirts. I’ve got a lot of chambray shirts too. I tend to wear blue mostly or blue and white stripes.h3. That shade of blue is so tied to labour and making things isn’t it?

Yeah I suppose that’s where the phrase blue collar comes from. I sometimes wear blue overalls in the workshop and they’re more like a royal blue. They’re traditional Spanish overalls and they’re all cotton and they’ve got elasticated cuffs and an elasticated waist and a slightly diagonal double-breasted zip, which gives them a little racy pip, a bit like a formula one mechanic from the 60s. Just functional details like the cuffs mean that if you’re doing certain types of woodwork or whatever, nothing goes up your sleeves. They work really well, they’re comfortable and again, they wear nicely.

Have you got many more of these Spanish shirts?

Yeah, all my shirts, I realised, are either like this or from Oliver Spencer. Those are nearly all blue and white striped but really beautifully cut, really nice little details, not too fancy, not quite workwear, but sort of informed by that utilitarian quality. More of a white collar uniform but maybe more like the clerk’s than the director’s.h3. What other brands do you tend to wear?

I end up wearing Albam jeans a lot because I knew someone who worked there and I ended up doing a project with them and I got some jeans through that as a part payment. They’re just nice, simple jeans; it’s Japanese denim, made in England and I like that. I guess that’s partly what I like about Oliver Spencer, it’s sort of that smallscale thing and their shirts tend to be made in Portugal. It’s a bit more local and there’s an aspiration to make quality things in small batches, taking care over the details; it’s the details that make them because mostly it’s just very simple stuff.

Does what you wear on a day-to-day basis differ much from what you wear to work in?

No I tend to wear the same stuff all the time during the week and over the weekends – there’s very little difference.

Is there anything in your wardrobe you couldn’t do without?

There are things that I wear in the workshop, like I’ve got overalls and I’ve got a welding jacket, but that’s just protective stuff. It’s not anything you’d ever wear out.
h3. Tell me about your glasses.

Glasses are a sort of essential. These I’ve had for like, 20 years now, maybe a bit more even. Most of my glasses – like these – I’ve bought second-hand, most of them from Brick Lane market for about a pound. I think these were £1.50. What I really liked about them is they were just a very simple, almost classic shape but they have that funny angle just there that stops them from being traditional aviators. When they were new they had a little strip of grey paint or finish over the bridge which made them feel like they were from the early 80s. That just wore off with time and they’ve had arms replaced and they’ve been fixed a few times.

I’m now at a stage where I really need bifocals, so I’ve got a pair of bifocals that wouldn’t fit in these frames, which is lucky because I don’t really get on with them so I tend to just wear those when I’m on the computer. I’m constantly swapping glasses which is really annoying. It’s hard to buy new frames though, you end up being a walking billboard with some massive Dolce & Gabbana logo down the arms or whatever which feels really weird to have on your face. I wouldn’t wear that on a T-shirt either.h3. What’s the oldest thing in your wardrobe?

Probably old German work jackets. You see them everywhere now. I used to buy them in a place on Cheshire Street off Brick Lane but the oldest one I bought in Berlin about 30 years ago.

And it’s still holding up?

Yeah, I wore it all the time for years but then stopped for a bit when it was getting to that point where it was going to fall apart. I’ve got a few of those jackets so I wore the other ones, but it comes out sometimes – it’s a favourite. What I liked about them is even though they’re a bit scruffy they can also be smart. I think that’s the thing I mostly struggle with: partly being a cyclist – that’s perhaps the main thing – and wanting things that are functional for cycling but aren’t cycling gear, and things I can wear in the workshop and build up wear, I suppose.

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